From the archives.
Being in a band is great, eh?
All you have to do is find three other best friends who are amazingly talented and who you can easily share ten years of your life with while living in the same house, eating the same food, living out of each other’s pockets and having sex with the same people.
You’ll have exactly the same aesthetic sensibilities and will be generous and fair with each other when it comes to sharing interview time, guitar strings and practice space money. You’ll even all agree on the same band name and things like envy, jealousy, drug addiction, alcoholism and writer’s block won’t affect you at all! You’ll all be millionaires and live in country houses by album three! Won’t you? I mean, that’s bound to happen, right? What could go wrong? Ummm. How about EVERYTHING?
FORMING THE BAND
You HAVE to have some kind of common musical ideas. Often student bands are formed around a bunch of half-talented egomaniacs with totally different tastes who think their diversity bonds them together. For example, the Godspeed You Black Emperor fan cellist is fucking the singer who wants to be like if the guy from System Of A Down was a rapper who lives with the drummer who worships The Prodigy who used to go to school with the Franz Ferdinand-obsessed bass player who dates the tambla-player’s Beta Band-loving sister in Bradford, who used to be a backing vocalist but got replaced by the R&B singer from Hull who is an expert in “mixology”, who’s now got the hots for the new total idiot guitarist who lists Aphex Twin, late-Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley, Dizzee Rascal and The Kinks as his influences. The overall aim of the band is to sound like a Far Eastern-influenced Killers but with drum ‘n’ bass beats, grime MCing, “fucked up shit”, a “Klaxons rave vibe” and early-Velvets, mixed with funk metal, lounge music and homophobic dancehall.
Oh shit, my ears just killed themselves.
